Description

Save the humanoids from the impending aliens in the sequel to Defender. The task is still rescuing humanoids before Landers can turn them into Mutants, while avoiding and shooting other foes, however you must now carry humanoids to safety through the Stargate of the title.

Entering this Stargate not only warps you to the nearest humanoid in jeopardy, but can also warp you ahead (while on the first 15 levels) if you enter it with 4 or more humanoids, and give you extra lives if you warp with 10 humanoids, so there is a trade-off between guaranteeing the safety of existing humanoids, and trying to advance your position

There are more enemies on screen than ever before. The Inviso button makes you invisible to enemies, but also to yourself, so you will have to follow your bullets to work out where on the screen you are.

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Developer commentary

Eugene Jarvis, creator of both Defender and its sequel Stargate, says that although the gameplay and coding of Stargate is more refined, he prefers the relative simplicity of the original Defender.[Source: Retro Gamer Magazine, Load 55]

Title

Defender II is also known as Stargate. Williams determined that the game's name infringed on an existing trademark (apparently for a board game), and the name was changed.

Despite Williams' assertions, though, the game's name was not changed immediately after the arcade release. The disc reveals that Williams programmers had to go to Atari to reprogram the title screen for the already-finished 2600 version... the problem is, the game was in release as Stargate for the 2600 later in the year - the Defender II variant didn't show up in stores until 1988. Unless the 2600 game was programmed and released at the same time as the arcade game, Williams' timeline is faulty.